. : Dog’s Guide to BBcode and Post Styles : .


Ever been in an RP where you just see somebody posting a character(s) with this really AWESOME post style? Ever wanted to better understand how that darned BBcode works? Or have your own really awesome post format, one that was uniquely your own?
Well look no further! This is MY guide to how to make your posts look ~fabulous~ When you’re done here, I hope you go out and create your own fantastic design for whatever it is you’re looking for!
What other things should I add? Have I forgotten anything? Something specific you’d like to know? Just ask me! I’ll do my best to answer all of your BBcode needs biggrin

How in Arceus’s Name Does this BBcode work!?

How do you make such funky colors?
Well you see, BBcode actually accepts a lot of color names into its programming. The drop-down menu that says “post a reply” (PaR for short!) gives you only provides the most basic of the possible selections!


Darkred Olive
Red Blue
Orange Cyan
Brown Darkblue
Yellow Indigo
Green Violet


But there are so much more than these! If you experiment with the name of your color that you're using, you may just end up finding a new color to use biggrin To make your lives easier though, I've pulled up the Wikipedia page on Web (X11) Color Names! This list should make finding a color that you like so much easier! Once you're done? Plug the name into the brackets and let the fun begin! There’s also many more colors than these that you can use for whatever your needs may be, and a complete list of colors can be found on this page. With the colors that you can’t get from typing in a regular X11 name, you can just take the “Hex Code” and type it into the brackets. But don’t forget the pound sign (#) at the front!
Confused on either of these? Let me demonstrate!
[color=goldenrod] I want to use the color Goldenrod. [/color]

I want to use the color Goldenrod.
[color=#65000B]I want to use the color Rosewood.[/color]

I want to use the color Rosewood.

Pretty easy stuff, huh? There are even Hex Codes for colors that already have an X11 name. Example:
[color=blue] My name is Blue![/color]
[color=#0000FF] My name is Blue, too![/color]

My name is Blue!
My name is Blue, too!

Great, so you’ve got that down. But what about Rainbow fonts? Simple! Click here.
So now that you’ve got a good understand for how to get yourself the perfect the color(s), maybe you want to fiddle with the Hex Code and see for yourself what strange colors you manage to recreate? Go forth and make the forums more colorful!

What about font sizes?
This is a pretty simple to answer. The PaR gives you the ones that you’re most likely going to need:
Size 7 Size 9 Size 12 Size 18 Size 24.
But like with colors, there are more than just these! Infact, BBcode accepts sizes 0-24. They look like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
To change the font size, just go in and type in the number that you want! Example:
[size=0] [/size] [size=1]1 [/size] [size=2]2 [/size] [size=3]3 [/size] [size=4]4 [/size] [size=5]5 [/size] [size=6]6 [/size] [size=7]7 [/size] [size=8]8 [/size] [size=9]9 [/size] [size=10]10 [/size] [size=11]11 [/size] [size=12]12 [/size] [size=13]13 [/size] [size=14]14 [/size] [size=15]15 [/size] [size=16]16 [/size] [size=17]17 [/size] [size=18]18 [/size] [size=19]19 [/size] [size=20]20 [/size] [size=21]21 [/size] [size=22]22 [/size] [size=23]23 [/size] [size=24]24 [/size]

Once you know how to do that, you’re already an expert on font sizes!

External Sentence Structures
You’re probably wondering to yourself, what in Arceus’s name are “External Sentence Structures”? And I wouldn’t blame you, I thought the same thing when I was younger, too. But really, you’ve most likely already seen these used before in your daily internet-browsing lives!

“Dog, you’re crazy.” You’re probably saying to me right now. Well, first off, thank you for the compliment, but I assure you I’m much crazier than you think. Do these look familiar?
    Bold Italics Underline Strike

Our little friends from above are what are known as “External Sentence Structure”. They don’t change the grammar of the sentence in anyway (That’s called, “Internal Sentence Structure” by the way : P ), but can still change the meaning of what you’re saying. Or, it could be aesthetic. Whatever peaks your fancy!
Coded, these four ESS’s look like this:
[b]Bold[/b] [i]Italics[/i] [u]Underline[/u] [strike]Strike[/strike]

Make sense? Good? Good! Moving on!

Mother of Mew, just tell me how to make fancy text already!
Well I personally felt that the above demonstrations were quite fancy…- No? That’s not what you’re looking for…? Oooooooooooooooohhhhhh, you’re talking about the special characters and letters that we use sometimes. *sighs* Fiiiiiiiiiiiine. I guess I’ll tell you how to do that too. It’s really quite simple, just click here and it’ll take you to the generator that I use.
From there, you put the generated letters and put them in place of the original word… and presto! You’ve got yourself some fancy-looking text, ready to use at a moment’s notice!

Alignments
This, is another fairly simple thing to discuss. The PaR provides you with three options for text alignment:

Left
Center
Right

[align=left]Left[/align] [align=center]Center[/align] [align=right]Right[/align]

Aaaaaaaand…. Yeah that’s basically it. The only thing that I have to add is that when centering something, you can shorten the brackets to look like this:
[center] Center! Woot! [/center]

Center! Woot!


How do you add pictures?
This is pretty easy. You obtain the direct link to an image (right click on an image, and select “properties”, then use Ctrl+A to highlight the entire “Address (URL)” section) then place it inside of image brackets.
Confused? Follow this example: User Image
[img]http://i618.photobucket.com/albums/tt267/dragon_tamer_6_7/ImageHere2_zps451adb77.png[/img]

Easy, yes? Great! Moving on. You can also state within the brackets, which side of the post you would like your image to be, but only when using “left” or “right.”
User Image User Image
[imgleft]http://i618.photobucket.com/albums/tt267/dragon_tamer_6_7/ImageHere2_zps451adb77.png[/imgleft]
[imgright]http://i618.photobucket.com/albums/tt267/dragon_tamer_6_7/ImageHere2_zps451adb77.png[/imgright]


Linking?
Linking can be done a three ways, all of which require the “URL” brackets. You can link things either with the URL address, a specific word or phrase, or even a picture! And I’m here to show you how to do all of these!
First, let’s practice with the URL-linking first. You simply add the “url” brackets to the front and end of the address, just like an image, then viola! A link has been born!

http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRXXsgt4C6VRN4ZuzSmlrAYfiSS6YyhNPfglK2Tt55TZDKp0NDfbw
[url]place link url here![/url]

Click here to find the Link!
[url=place link url here!] here[/url] to find the Link!

Links can be colored too!
[url=http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRXXsgt4C6VRN4ZuzSmlrAYfiSS6YyhNPfglK2Tt55TZDKp0NDfbw] [color=#]links can be colored too![/color] [/url]

User Image
[url=put link url here!][img]place image url here![/img][/url]


Other cool things!

1.) The Captain, Lakita, and myself have two photobucket albums in between us that offer a wide selection of images to choose from for your posts.
This is the link to one of my sub-albums, which is basically used as a wardrobe for all of my characters. It's not nearly as large or as extensive an album as lakita and the captain's joint album, but mine includes men's fashion, professional women's attire, formal men's attire, visual kei, and other oddlot stuff I've added over the years.
The Captain and Lakita's album is incredibly extensive: 8-bit images, LOTS of anime girls with only a handful of guys, lots of dresses and other formal stuff, and much more!

. : Post Styles and Format Guide : .


Okay, so you’ve got the basics down for BBcoding, yes? (If not, almost all questions pertaining to the matter can be found in the top half of the guide) Now that you know all this funny coding stuff works, we can finally move onto showing you how to make an awesome posting style! As I’m sure you’ve seen, posting styles can come in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors, and complexity.

I’m going to explain how I start off my post styles whenever I’m trying to make a new one in five, -that’s right!- five easy steps!:

    * 1.) I put in where I want my text and dialogue to be, followed by what colors I want those two things to be. I highly recommend having the dialogue of your person being bolded so that way people can easily distinguish their actions from their words. Example:


Vern glanced down at his little Vulpix, her five tails curled around her nose cutely as she lay on his lap. He chuckled to himself, then reached down to stroke her. ”I hope you’re comfortable, little one. Because I’m not!” Rather than get up, Nala the Vulpix just rolled over onto her side, perfectly content to make her trainer uncomfortable.

[color=#]Character text here![/color][color=#2][b]”Character’s speech here!”[/b][/color][color=#]Character text here![/color]


    * 2.) I recommend, though by no means is it required, to make the size of your font anywhere between size 9-11, with 10 or 11 being the most aesthetically pleasing to the eye. You wouldn’t think it, but there are actually many people out there who find the standard “12” size font to be a serious eyesore. The eyesore-ish font size can make people who would’ve otherwise have read your post, not want to read it, especially if you then don’t distinguish between text and dialogue. The only reason this guide isn’t in a smaller font, is because that’s too much freaking work for me to go in and change the size of everything.

    Anyways, one of the things that you would need to do with your coding, if you chose to make the font a smaller size, is to make sure that the “size” brackets are on the outside of your color brackets. This may seem strange, but trust me on this. Whatever coding is changed the least (which for me at least, is the size), should be placed on the outside so that the command carries over through all “inner-changes”. An “Inner-change” is a term I made up, but it applies to changes to the coding that happen inside of another set of brackets, with the main ones being things such as color and E.S.S. Confused? Here’s my example!

[size=11][color=#] Teeeeext goes heeereeee[/color][color=color#2][b]”Dialogue”[/b][/color][color=#2]Text text text[/color][/size]


    * 3.) Okay, so now you’ve got that stuff figured out and added onto your Word Document or PaR page. From here, I normally grab a picture (or three… >w> ) and place them either above or below the “text section”, depending on what I so desire. It’s important that you add these pictures early on, at least if you’re me, so that way you can change the size and/or location of the image from early on and not have to worry about it later. I suggest, so as to have your posting style be more aesthetically pleasing, to try to not have pictures that are grotesquely large or aligned incorrectly. What do I mean by “aligned incorrectly”? Well, say you have this one really cool picture, but it’s longer horizontally/landscape and for some reason you decide to place it as a side picture instead of a top or bottom one. Looks pretty strange, right? Exactly! The samething in reverse, no one likes seeing a vertical picture being used at the top or bottom, it just isn’t very pleasing to the eye! Also, the more pictures you have on any of the four sides, the smaller they should be! At the end of this portion of the guide, I’ll have examples hyperlinked so as to help give you all some ideas!


    * 4.) Now that we have our picture(s), what about quotes, or song lyrics? Before you do that, I highly recommend putting the name of you character somewhere on this post style, most preferably at the top somewhere where our eyes are most likely going to be searching for their name. Also, for your convenience and that of your fellow RPers, hyperlink their name to their profile or storage thread! Great, NOW you can add quotes or song lyrics to your post style… But wait! If you’re including song lyrics: don’t add whole stanzas to that half of your posting format! Why? Well (a), it’s a waste of space and (b), it just looks tacky if you copy and paste the whole stanza to your post style; try and go for only the lines that really reflect your character’s personality. I understand that some songs must’ve just been meant for that character of yours (or vice versa?), but you should still only include a few lines from each song that you choose to incorporate into your post style. Yes! That’s right, you can use more than one song! I do it all the time! Normally, I have two different sets of song lyrics, with one set from one song going on the top half of the style and the other set from the other song, going on the bottom half. But of course, even I have exceptions to that! (Picture examples will be posted at the bottom of this) Feel free to put up your quotes/lyrics (if any) in any way or order that you so desire. And try to stylize those lyrics so they’re not so obviously the lyrics to a song or two!


    * 5.) Alright guys, don’t worry, I’m almost done telling you about how to make your RP post styles better, but don’t get me wrong, these lessons can be used for any kind of posting style! You’ve got the pictures layed out, the quotes you want to use, and the works! What’s left? Weeeeelllll… We must not forget the all important detail of… Their Pokémon! Yes, that’s right! Where are you going to put their babies? The answer to that is really simple: Would you prefer them to be at the top, or the bottom? Once you’ve got yourself the answer to that question, make an “end” to your post style; my best recommendation would just be a long flat line that’s aligned properly to the rest of the post style, which thus indicates the ending to the post, while providing another area to place extra information such as Pokemon, attire, and even the character’s location and mood if you really want. This “extras” section can just as easily be placed at the top of the post too, to provide a “start” to where the post format actually starts. Examples will be linked at the bottom.

    Great! So now, from there, just stylize it to your heart’s content, and presto you’ve got yourself a shiny new post style; start posting slackers! And as promised, here are some hyperlinked examples to some many different varieties of post formats that I have made over the years.



Created by Dogdemon_5